Today I read Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, a book Evan Gottlieb assigned for his theory course this term, titled “Post 9/11 Theory.” I’m excited that I’m going to be sitting in on the class and having a chance this term to engage in dialogue with others about theory.
I’m a bit unsettled by some of Baudrillard’s ethics, though. While I think some of his assessments in his other works (I’ve only read short excerpts) are correct, I always get the feeling that he somehow doesn’t seem to care about lives and dignity in the same way I do. He seems a bit too cynical (perhaps that’s the right word?) for me.
I think I agree with one of his central theses in this book, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were actually symbolic, not political, and that what they symbolize is the self-destructive nature of globalization. He also notes that this attack is different from other attacks in that it used the very tools of globalization against the globalizing powers. He writes:
We have to face facts, and accept a new terrorism has come into being, a new form of action which plays the game, and lays hold of the rules of the game, solely with the aim of disrupting it. Not only do these people not play fair, since they put their own deaths into play — to which there is no possible response (‘they are cowards’) — but they have taken over all the weapons of the dominant power. Money and stock-market speculation, computer technology networks — they have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power. (19)
I am not sure I agree, however, with his assertion that “We are far beyond ideology and politics now” (9). Globalization is terror for Baudrillard, and the attack on the World Trade Center “is terror against terror — there is no longer any ideology behind it” (9).
I think I disagree because, for someone to be a terrorist, don’t they have to be working under an ideology that views humans as not fully humans — as objects, as tools? If 4,000 are killed, then those 4,000 cannot be seen as valuable in and of themselves, but rather as objects. They are not “Thous” but “Its” (to reference Buber). I don’t agree with Kant’s epistemology of morality, but I do agree with his Humanity Formula that says we should never treat another solely as a means and not as an end in itself.
And Baudrillard has a passage that relates directly to this, in that it seems to counter this Kantian/Buberian(?) ethics, but I can’t seem to find it, and now I’m frustrated. My thoughts are also getting all muddled. I will try to return to this later when they are a bit more clear.
